Today's DAR
This time each year there is a flurry of activity in the DAR Museum galleries, a flurry rivaled only by Congress. From the start of January to the end of March, the DAR Museum and other Headquarters staff are busy preparing to open a new exhibition. Months and years of researching, designing, planning, coordinating, and editing culminate in this three-month-long stretch of winter where the concept becomes a reality. Planning for this exhibition began in March of 2020 and took place mainly over Zoom from the comfort of our homes.
To Supply A Nation – A New DAR Museum Exhibition
This year's Museum exhibition, To Supply A Nation: Origins and Impacts of Everyday Things, looks at the sources of the materials that make up the typical objects in early American homes and how consumption of household goods affected people, wildlife, and the environment. Through the objects' materials, visitors will find that few early Americans made their household goods in the confines of their homes.
Tracing the supply chains of these materials to their sources reveals the toll that early consumption had on the world. For example, the mahogany for an 18th-century desk and bookcase required the exotic wood to be harvested and transported from forests deep in the Yucatan Pennisula or Caribbean. Often this grueling work was done by enslaved Africans. Enslaved sawyers and cabinetmakers were utilized to cut the raw material and make it into the goods being purchased throughout North America. Demand for goods made of mahogany drove up the market for enslaved labor and depleted the forests of this rare wood.
By looking at probate inventories, wills, newspaper ads, personal accounts, and archaeology reports, we are better able to understand what goods were most common in early American households and expand upon how they became the objects we know today.
This exhibition was designed by Riggs Ward Design (http://riggsward.com/) and will be open through 2022 at the DAR Headquarters. For more information on current, past, and upcoming exhibitions at the DAR Museum visit us here: https://www.dar.org/museum/exhibitions.
